Master Plan - Part 2 - WIP
Key deliverables (e.g. over next 12-24 months)
Follows from Master Plan Part 1

• CoD WG success
  • Align with making the Compute-over-Data Working Group (CoD WG) successful
  • Meet with key participants in CoD WG to establish useful collaborations
  • Splitting useful parts of Bacalhau into reusable pieces for other projects
  • This will be an ongoing theme throughout all of the future development as well, and collaboration on all of the following topics must be encouraged
• User success
  • Listen to user feedback as they’re onboarded and develop new features and improvements to make them successful
  • Examples so far: GPU support, support for external HTTP(S) URLs as input data
• Consensus & verification
  • Keep track of state of jobs as well as verification of jobs
  • Iterate on the verification protocol for deterministic WASM workloads (discussion already underway with Consensus team)
  • Prototype and test an implementation of the verification protocol
• Smart contract
  • Smart contract implementation of scheduler in FVM
  • Integrating smart contract into Transport and Controller interfaces in Bacalhau
• Efficiency
  • Work to ensure smart contract implementation can approach efficiency of libp2p based solution
  • Throughput is probably more important than latency for batch jobs
• Formal verification
  • Formally verifying the Bacalhau smart contract protocol will help ensure correctness and eliminate protocol bugs
  • See: Glow, Dafny, Coq, Why3
• BFT up to ⅓
  • Support Byzantine Fault Tolerance assuming ⅔ of the participants are honest
• Nondeterministic execution
  • Per the original prototype, bring back support for verifying nondeterministic workloads (e.g. the docker driver, GPU workloads) via evidence of work
• Plugin system
  • Support various flavors of evidence provided to support verifiable non-deterministic execution
• Reputation system
  • Build a reputation system around the judgements being made by the verification protocol
  • This would allow a public dashboard of providers and how trustworthy they are
• Incentive model
  • Based on the consensus protocol, ensure the incentive model is effective from a game-theoretic perspective, building on the formal verification work
• Developer experience
  • Continuously improving the UX of the system for users and service providers
• Hardening evidence of work system
  • Making the nondeterministic execution more robust via more sophisticated signal processing
• Secrecy
  • Support private data and code
• Long-running servers
  • Support for long-running servers (e.g. web applications, microservices) as well as data processing use-cases

If you have comments about what you think we should build, please let us know on the Filecoin Slack, #bacalhau channel 😄